“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Friday, October 18, 2013

Encounters, Inc. Part 1

This year's Halloween story:

When it first occurred to me that
I was getting in deep myself, that I too might be culpable, I was listening to
a recording of Tom describing one of his nightmares—Tom, whom I knew to be a
murderer. The job I’d been hired to do consisted of turning the raw material of
all these recordings into something that was part literary thriller and part
content marketing, something in between a book and a brochure. I don’t have any
of the recordings anymore because I made a point of destroying any and all physical
evidence of my association with Marcus Friedman. But I’ve held on to all the
writing I did. I can always say it’s just fiction, right?

Anyway, I was listening to Tom’s
voice, turning his words into a story as well as I could—and, to be honest, I
didn’t really know what I was doing—when it struck me. This guy has admitted,
if not to me yet then to Marcus, that he killed a guy a few blocks from here,
some guy who’d harassed him one too many times, killed him and left his body to
rot at the base of the concrete overlook tucked in the bend between the Main
Street bridge over the Saint Mary's River and Thieme Drive, which runs along the east
bank. He’s admitted to murdering someone, and here I am interviewing him for some
ill-defined marketing strategy this Marcus guy hired me to implement—and I’m not
turning him in.

The thought that I should probably
at least consider diming on Tom came not from any sense that he was dangerous
or evil or anything like that. On the contrary, I thought I should encourage
him to confess because it seemed the only way to save him from the torments of
his own mind. Turning him in might be the only way to save him from complete
insanity. It was only after having that thought that I realized I could be in some
trouble myself for letting things go on this long without saying anything. Maybe,
just maybe, I thought, I’ll end up having to bring the whole story to light to
save us both.

For whatever reason, though, I
just kept on working on the story:

…After awaking, Tom couldn’t
close his eyes again, making him wonder if he’d been sleeping with them
open—and how long could that state of affairs have persisted? He sat up in bed
and scanned the darkened room for the disturbance that had woken him. When he
lay back down, he assured himself the condition was only a momentary dream
echo, but his gaze remained locked on the ceiling and the buzzing, wobbling
whirl of the dusty fan blades. He hesitated before reaching up to probe his
eyes with his fingers, anticipating something awful. Postponing the discovery,
he pushed one leg cautiously out from under the duvet, and then the other.
Finally, he folded his body up from the bed, holding his head fixed rigidly
atop a neck stiff with apprehension.

On his feet, moving forward on
sturdy legs, he felt more together, leaving behind that seldom remarked feeling
of vulnerability we all experience in our places of slumber. He tested the sweep
of his eyes beneath the fixed-open lids. Each pass from one side to the other
brought a peculiar sensation in its wake, a sort of dragging discomfort approaching
the threshold of pain. Already having walked as far as the passage from his
meager kitchen to the open space of his living room, he thought to try a
darting glance upward, only to find it caused a strange drawing at his lower
lids down to the skin atop his cheeks and a fleshy bunching up under his brows.
Feeling a simultaneous poke above each eye, he halted mid-step in the corner
before stepping through the bathroom doorway, quickly leveling his gaze. Now he
could no longer resist examining his face with halting, trembling fingers.

Rushing toward the mirror, he realized
he had to turn back for the light switch. When he finally reached a position
hovering over the sink, he felt an odd calm descend on him, as if the shock of
what he was seeing with his skewered eyes on the black-flecked glass somehow
shattered the surface of the dream’s deception—or as if the gruesomeness, the
sheer sadistic inventiveness of the procedure, painless though it was, pushed
him toward some state beyond panic. He leant in to investigate the surgically
precise mechanism, composed of carved slits in the upper and lower lids of each
eye, forming tracks for the tiny bars vertically impaling the delicate white sacks
of fluid, preventing them from any fleshly occlusion. First came the slowly
widening incision of his lips into a smile. Then the chuff of a laugh.

“Now who would go and do such a
thing?” he posed to the white-lit, echoing vacancy…

***

Aside from the baroque dreams,
Tom’s was your typical haunting story: he’d killed a man, and now that man’s
ghost was insisting on some type of reckoning. To be fair, Tom claimed not to
know for sure that the man was dead because the crime had been committed in a
hallucinatory whirl of drug-induced confusion. But it wasn’t long before he
determined to settle that uncertainty once and for all by clambering down the
river bank to see what he’d left to bake and putrefy in the late summer sun
amid the weeds growing up through all that dried mud, reeking of decay, at the
base of the crumbling, graffiti-marked monument towering over the brown,
insalubrious waters of the Saint Mary's, from which would continue to emanate for a
couple of months that invisible miasma, redolent of rotting fish, that only the
coldest winters could cleanse from the air. But before I get into any of that I
have to tell you about Marcus Friedman and why he was having me write this poor
guy’s story.

Marcus found me on LinkedIn. He’d
been searching for a local writer when he came across my profile. After
exchanging a few emails, we ended up meeting for the first time at Old Crown, a
neat little bar and coffee roaster on Anthony Blvd, one of those painted
cinderblock buildings with a ceiling of exposed ductwork. I was at a quaintly
light-painted wooden table, admiring a two-page spread for iPads—“The
experience of a product. Will it make life better? Does it deserve to
exist?”—in the previous week’s New Yorker,
when I glanced up and saw this huge rugby player masquerading as a businessman
making giant, energetic strides toward my small, elevated table, which was
then, at an unaccustomed hour for me, set off in a dull gilded aura by the last
light of the day issuing meekly through the shop’s inconspicuous row of
out-of-reach windows. Surging into that light, this athlete with a Caribbean
air smiled a smile that was like its own dawn competing with the gloaming
preview of tomorrow’s truer version. When he reached out his hand, I was
surprised to see that it was human in scale, not much larger than mine.

“Jim Conway?” he half questioned,
half insisted. “I recognize you from your LinkedIn profile. Marcus Friedman.”
He was already pulling back the opposite chair by the time I could gesture
toward it. “God, I love this place,” he said, turning this way and that to
devour the ambiance with his eyes, all the while making these big swirling and
swimming gestures. “It’s so—warm—and intimate. Like we’re wrapped up in the
residue of like a thousand great conversations.”

I had to smile at this, though I hadn’t yet
been able to get out a single word.

Manifestly responding to my
smile, he said, “Ah, but here I am throwing out metaphors to the metaphor master.
Well, what do you think? What metaphor would you use for this place?” From a
position leaning forward with his arms on the table, he leaned back slowly,
draping his right arm over the back of his chair, authoritatively opening the
exchange for my contribution. This was, after all, a job interview.

“Well, Mr. Friedman—”

“—Marcus, please.”

“Well, Marcus, it would depend on
the context and your goals. The idea of walking into a place and sensing past
experiences—good times, stimulating conversations—that’s really intriguing. But
if I were writing copy for Old Crown I’d stay away from the word ‘residue.’”

He smiled his aspiringly solar
smile, bringing both hands out over the table, showing me his palms,
simultaneously offering me something—recognition, praise—and claiming my entire
person. I was torn between wanting to allow myself to be drawn in by his energy
and charisma and wanting to throw all that smarm back in his face. And he
seemed to embody a mass of similar contradictions. What I’d thought at first
was some kind of knit hat were actually dreadlocks, but arranged in a way that
was somehow much more businesslike than my own give-a-care gladiator cut. That
Caribbean air—he looked to be of largely African ancestry, but his skin had
this gilded, gleaming pallor against which my own Scotch-Irish sallowness was
as dull as day-old dairy. And most of the salesmen I know don’t have deltoids
that strain the seams of their blazers.

“This place,” I began, suddenly,
inexplicably inspired, “this place is an old post-industrial warehouse where
the last people on earth came together to ride out the apocalypse. Only that has
been so long ago now nobody even remembers. It just feels like it’s been here
forever—impossible to imagine a time when there was no Old Crown. The people
who come to places like this—and there’s another one pretty similar to it just
up the road here on Anthony—they don’t just want a cheap cup of coffee and an
occasional beer or mixed drink. They want to try new things, like beer from
some small town they’ve never heard of in Germany, or coffee made from beans
grown in Papua New Guinea. The reason these coffee houses were built where they
are is that our community college is only about a mile and a half from here.
These people are educated—and for the first time they actually care how their
goods are made. Next door is a health food shop where you can get locally grown
poultry and produce. This place, unassuming as it as, represents the promise of
a new economy—a sort of Capitalism 2.0. Look, right here on the wall next to us
we see the work of local artists. In that room back there past the bathrooms,
the one with the blue walls, book clubs meet there, writers’ groups, start-up
charities, you name it. It’s not a big corporate chain like Starbucks, because
we like places with local flavor. Through the exotic beers and coffees and
conversation, we get this tiny window into far-flung regions of the globe. But
the window’s built into the wall of what’s unmistakably our own house. We’ve
been here all along, surviving the ravages of a less human, more predatory
economy. The battle’s not over yet—not by a longshot. But places like this are
the beginning. This place doesn’t need any metaphors, Mr. Friedman—Marcus—because
this place is a symbol in its own right.”

Marcus granted me the full
dazzling radiance of his too-ready smile and shook his head in faux disbelief
as he brought his hands together, once, twice, three times in big sweeps of his
bulked-up arms. “And you just came up with that on the spot, huh? You got a
gift, Jim. God damn it, you got a gift.” To signal that the preliminaries were
over and we were getting down to business, he laid his forearms parallel to
each other on the table in front of him and leaned toward me. “Do you know why
I like you for this job?”

“Ha! You haven’t even told me
what this job is yet. You said in your emails you needed a content marketer who
understood storytelling. You said you were looking for a copywriter who wanted
to write novels and short stories. My response to that is you’d probably have a
harder time finding one who doesn’t.”

“I definitely need someone who
has an ear for noticing things like residue being a poor choice of word. And I
definitely need someone who can write awesome stories. But what you have that everyone
else I’ve talked to lacks is optimism. No offense, but most of your fellow
English majors are a bunch of pinko commie, whining feminazi fucktards who
think the world started off shitty and just keeps getting worse because too few
people are pinko feminist fucktards like them.”

My failure to fully stifle the
eruption of a belly laugh encouraged him to proceed. As he did, I realized he
must’ve spent quite a bit of time on my blog—though I’m probably more of a
pinko myself than he seemed able to glean—and that the interview had progressed
from the portion in which Marcus was testing me to the one in which he would
pitch me his idea.

“And why,” I asked, “is it
important for you to have someone who doesn’t think we should give up on capitalism—or
on letting men roam around freely without gelding them?”

“It’s not just that,” he said,
leaning back to liberate his untamed hands. “I want someone who will be as
excited about my business as I am, someone who’s not afraid of money, who
doesn’t think it’s evil or any other ridiculous nonsense like that.”

Looking back, I realize the
thought that occurred to me then—that any of my anti-capitalist collegiate
colleagues would’ve made quick work of finding a way to justify taking in a
little extra revenue, that I was hardly unique in that regard—should have sparked
a wider suspicion. But, to retrospectively justify my own obtuseness, I was
just too distracted trying to figure out what Marcus was about to try to sell
me on trying to help him sell. Was he starting his own rugby league? Hosting a
capoeira tournament?

“Let me ask you a question, Jim,”
he said frowning. After a pause to gather his thoughts—which led me to conclude
the ensuing performance was something he’d rehearsed—he locked eyes with me and
asked, “What do you think scares people most?”

“For mothers of young children,
it’s that their kids will come to harm. For everyone else, it’s humiliation.”

“Whoa—ha ha. Thought about this
before, huh?”

I thoroughly enjoyed the brief
fluster my ready answer produced in Marcus as he worked out how to segue back
into his pitch.

“Interesting that you jump to
little children and their mothers,” he picked up at last. “See, I believe fear
falls into two categories. One of them I guess you could say includes
humiliation—it’s all the practical things we’re afraid of, the fight or flight
type of stuff. But there’s another type of fear, closer to the one that had us
running from our bedrooms to our parents’ rooms as kids. Now, Jim, I’m
curious—do you really believe all that stuff you were saying about Capitalism
2.0?”

“Well, for the most part, I do. I
think the colloquial expression for what I was doing there is ‘laying it on
thick.’”

“Ha ha—fair enough. Now the
second part of the question—what was wrong with the first version of
capitalism?”

“I suppose it was focused too exclusively
on profits. Every other human concern got coopted and overridden. If 2.0 is
going to work, it’ll be because we come up with ways to include other
considerations in our business models—things like working conditions,
environmental impacts, and consequences for local communities. Instead of
subordinating everything to that one number—the profit—that number will have to
incorporate a broader array of concerns.”

“But who wants to work like that?
I’ll tell you, even the most ruthless Wall Street guy, you sit him down, and
even though you and I agree he’s not doing anything but exploiting people,
he’ll go on and on about how what he does benefits society.”

“And how does your business
benefit society?”

Marcus drew himself up, his lips
stretching slowly into a proud, fatherly smile. “Well, Jim, it’s like you said.
What individuals do has an impact on the broader community. I’m basically in
the entertainment industry, but the trend in entertainment is toward more and
more personalized, more and more individualized experiences. We don’t go to the
movies anymore. We watch Netflix. We don’t go to arcades anymore. We have Xboxes.
We don’t even have conversations anymore. We post status updates and tweets. A
growing number of people aren’t even going to church anymore. So what’s the
impact on communities? What’s the fallout?”

“Are you saying you want to scare
people to bring them together, to foster a sense of community, and make money
on it somehow? Please tell me you’re not asking me to help recruit people for a
cult.”

“No, no, not a cult. But in your
answer to my question about what scares people you forgot about those kids the
mothers are afraid will come to harm. What’s it like for them? You see what the
purpose of that fear is for them—it’s to get them to run to their parents’
bedroom. And that second, less practical type of fear stays with us our whole
lives too. And it serves the same purpose. I notice some of the most popular
posts on your blog are ghost stories. Why do you think that is?”

“Everybody enjoys a good ghost
story—well, nearly everybody.”

“Yeah, but why? Why would people
go out of their way to be scared? I’ll tell you, I’ve been asking that question
for a long time, and no one really has a good answer for it. But then I started
looking at it from a different angle. You know how every fall you start hearing
people—predominantly women—talking about pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks? You
know how everyone gets excited when the leaves start to change colors? Well,
what the hell are they excited about? Sure, the colors are spectacular and all.
But what’s the next step? The leaves fall off man. Then the tree stands there,
just a big stick in the mud all winter. Fall symbolizes death. Halloween is a
time for reconnecting with dead loved ones. What comes next is cold and barren
winter—so why do so many people love it all so much?”

It was at this point that I
acknowledged to myself I was finding what Marcus had to say really impressive.
“People start thinking about death,” I answered, “and it makes them want to be
closer to their loved ones, the ones who are still living. People get
frightened of something that goes bump in the night and it makes them want to
sleep closer to their parents or spouses. People want to tell scary stories
around a campfire because it makes them all feel closer together. That’s why
the guy in the movie who says ‘I’ll be right back’ always gets killed. The
whole point is to huddle together. The whole point is community.”

Marcus took this opportunity to
ply me with some hyperbolic flattery, something to the effect that anyone who
read my work could tell I was smart but seeing my mind work in real time… etc.
Then, at long last, he came to his business idea. “We used to have these big
harvest celebrations, but not many of us harvest anymore. Even when we do come
together for things like football games and concerts, it’s not like we even
know most of people in the crowd. Now, Mr. Conway, I’m inviting you to come in
on the ground floor here, though I’ve already done quite a few proof-of-concept
outings. It has to start with individuals—that’s where you come in. You’re
going to hook them with the stories.”

For the past six years, Marcus
had been organizing camping trips to haunted houses every October for a little
extra cash. It had started with a place in his hometown in Terra Haute. He and
his friends had been going to this house to pitch their tents in the yard every
year around Halloween going back to high school. They built campfires,
rehearsed the story of the house, dared each other to go in—alone, of
course—and bring something out from inside as proof. Everyone loved it.
Whenever he talked about it to people outside his closest circle, they all but
invariably said they would love to participate in something like that. Marcus’s
eyes turned to dollar signs. First, the outings to the house in Terra Haute
started getting bigger. Next, Marcus started scoping out other locations,
usually no more than abandoned houses on isolated, modestly forested plots.
Before long, he was planning months in advance for three separate expeditions
on consecutive weekends.

“Eighty bucks a head, and I
supply the location, arrange things with neighbors and law enforcement, maybe
throw in someone who can play guitar or hand drums. Most important, I supply
the story. Jim, this is pure word-of-mouth so far, and no matter how hard I try
I still end up turning a bunch of people down every year. So I finally decided,
I’ve got some money saved up, I’m going to go big with this thing. As for the
impact on the community, well, it’s just a step, just a little step, but who
knows? If it catches on like I think it will, think of all the variations.
Every season has its stories and rituals. So you get everyone you know together
and share it. And without any of the hellfire or guilt-tripping or boring shit
you get at church.”

“You may run into some thorny
dilemmas trying to mix commerce with what people consider sacred. But
personally I think it’s a great idea. Whether it’s aboveboard or not, you’re
paying for all the feast days and rituals at church too. At least this way it’s
honest. You’re kind of branching the vacation industry out into the market for
encounters with the supernatural—or at least the extra-mundane.”

“I need two things right now,”
Marcus said, standing up from his chair. “I need new locations—I’m working on
that as we speak. And I need stories—that’s where you come in. In the next
couple of days, I’m going to be sending you contact info for a guy who’s had
one of those encounters with the supernatural. What I want you to do—if you’re
interested in partnering up with me—is talk to the guy, interview him. Bring
something to record it if you need to, however you think it’ll work best. You
write the story. We get it out there on social media and wherever else we can
get people to listen. And then we sit back and watch this thing blow up.”

I sat watching him make a
production of how urgently he needed to get back on the road, assuming it was
an element of his recruitment strategy. We shook hands to seal the partnership.
As he was walking toward the front door, I called to him. “Marcus, one more
question. These stories—are you envisioning them as more literary writings, or
more marketing oriented? Because those two styles can end up being at odds.”

His smile dawned one last time
for the night. “That’s your department now. I only ask one thing—make sure it
doesn’t sound cheap.”

***

… A human mass beside him as he
eased into consciousness set Tom to channeling through his memory of recent
events until he decided it must be Ashley. Immediately, under his ribs, a humming
warmth began to gather and flow outward, suffusing his limbs with an airy lightness
as a thousand meager but incessant doubts, which dogged him even in sleep,
blinked out of existence. His consciousness pulsed piece by piece to life in
the still darkened room, like an athlete shaking his limbs into readiness
before an event. With this stepwise return from oblivion came the intensifying
awareness that he was experiencing the very sensation he’d determined to resist,
this warm buzzing hollowness and weightless elation—that this was the very
feeling he’d decided was the product of a deadly intoxicant. Pure poison. And with
that unspoken word poison still
echoing among his mist-cloaked thoughts there came a sharp pricking deep inside
his nostrils, causing him to grimace and recoil into his pillow, jerking his
face to one side then the other. It wasn’t Ashley sleeping next to him. It was
someone who’d just smoked a menthol.

Finding himself in the middle of
the room, his hands held out to check the advance of any attacker, he glared
down at the bed with its twisted sheets and undecipherable chaos of mounded
folds and depressions, each heartbeat bulging under the skin of his temples,
each jagged breath ruling out any hope of remaining quietly inconspicuous. He
stood there long enough to calm his breathing before stepping forward and
smoothing the comically disheveled sheets with his palms. What kept him from being
able to reassure himself that the presence he’d sensed was no more than the
remnant of a dream borne of his guilty conscience was that he couldn’t recall
ever in his life having had a dream that featured a scent of any sort, much
less one so recognizable and vividly real. It took him some time to fall asleep
again, and when he did he had a perfectly conventional dream about being called
before a court, the assembled judges looking over the tops of ridiculously tall
and imposing podiums…

***

“I feel like whatever I do or
whatever I say it’s bound to be exactly the wrong thing,” Tom said. “It’s like
she wants something from me but I never know what it is. Thing is, I don’t even
think she knows what it is—what she
really wants is for me to figure out what she wants and give it to her as a
this perfect surprise. So I’m not only supposed to read her mind—I’m supposed
to be able to read it so clearly I know more about what’s going to make her
happy than she does. All the while, I’m thinking, does this chick even like me?
All I get from her are signs of disapproval and disappointment.” He looked down
at the table, shaking his head. “I hate that I’m still talking about it in the
present tense.”

Tom’s voice resonates with a
soulfulness at odds with his general air of insouciance—which at times borders
on impatience. He experiences his inner dramas in solitude. He’s around six
foot tall, and at thirty-three still has a young athlete’s gleaming complexion.
As he’s speaking, you have the sense that he’s at once minutely aware of your
responses—even anticipating those you’ve yet to make—and prejudiced in favor of
some other activity or exchange he could be engaged in, almost as if he’d
already participated in several conversations exactly like the one you were
currently having. There’s a softness to the flesh around his eyes, but his
eyebrows rise outward in subtle curves that create an illusion of severe peaks.
The combined effect is of a sympathetic man restraining some bound up energy,
perhaps harboring some unspoken rage, one of those generally kind people you
know at a glance not to get on the wrong side of. Or maybe these impressions
were based on what I already knew. Even through his somewhat loose work shirt
you could see his workouts went beyond the simple cardio routines he spoke of to
me.

He was telling me about why he
and Ashley had broken up. “We were always at loggerheads, like there was some
unresolved issue keeping her from opening up to me—or like I’d done something
to really piss her off. That’s what it felt like anyway. But no matter how hard
I tried I couldn’t figure out what I’d done, and she wasn’t about to tell me.
Once in a while, I’d get pissed off myself—I couldn’t stand her always being
ready to go off, having that vague disapproval of hers hanging over my head all
the time. We’d have these knockdown-drag-out arguments. I never got physical. Though
she hit me and pushed me around quite a bit. For her, I kept getting the sense
that it was these arguments that were the deal-breaker. They were pretty
intense, and toward the end they were happening pretty often too. But I kept
thinking, you know, we can’t work out whatever our issue is if we don’t talk
about it, and every time we tried to talk about it we ended up arguing. It’s
probably my fault. I always felt like she was just being so unfair so I ended
up losing my temper and the next thing you know we’re not talking to each
other.”

Tom and Ashley had been planning
on moving in together, at the apartment Tom lives in now, when their final
blowup occurred. They had been leaving Henry’s, a low-key old bar on Main
Street known for being classier than any of the hole-in-the-wall establishments
that predominate in that area, walking back to what was then Tom’s apartment, a
one-bedroom on Rock Hill, when two skater kids saw fit to shout a couple of obscenities
at them from across the street. “To this day, I can’t figure out why she did
it,” Tom told me. “She must’ve already been really pissed off about
something—but, if she was, I hadn’t noticed it. And we’d just been talking
inside the bar for like an hour.” Ashley had heard the first two or three
insults care of the young skaters (an honorary term, since neither had a board)
and then stopped to turn toward them. “The weird thing was, I’d never seen that
expression on her face before. She had this gleam—it was almost like she was
smiling.”

“Hey,” she shouted back to them.
“I know you two.” They stopped,
turned, and took a couple of steps back to get a better look at her and hear
what she was about to say. “I met these girls who pointed you guys out a while
back. They said they tried to date you but you were just too horrible in bed.
They said you didn’t know how to fuck.”

“Ashley, what the hell are you
doing?”

“You must have the wrong guys,
cunt. If you want, I’ll show you how I can fuck right now.” The taller of the
two kids started walking with these clown-shoe strides toward them, leaning back
with his shoulders even as he thrust his hips forward, bobbing his head, and
flailing his arms to puff out his elbows. That he was so lanky and dressed in
that faux unfashionable apparel that’s so fashionable now—shaved head, wife-beater
undershirt, testicle compressing jeans—made it easier for Tom to reserve enough
mental space to marvel at Ashley, and to wonder what could possibly have gotten
into her, while all but ignoring the threat.

“Listen guys,” he started to say
before Ashley began again.

“Yeah, they said it was mostly
because you both have really tiny dicks. But of course it doesn’t help that
you’re illiterate retards.”

The bald guy actually stopped in
the middle of Main Street to look back at his friend, as if expecting to see
him doubled over with laughter at the joke he was playing on his buddy. But
this guy was looking straight ahead toward Ashley, taking his hands out of his
pockets and moving a step forward. “What the fuck Ashley!” Tom shouted,
stepping in front of her, glancing quickly at each of the skater kids’ hands to
see if they were reaching for weapons.

“Yeah, Ashley, what the fuck?”
the lanky one said, moving forward again. “Now we’re going to have to fuck up
Tinker Bell here and have a chat to find out who’s been spreading these lies
about us.”

Tom turned around to see Ashley
backing away. “Even then I swear I saw her grinning.” There was nothing behind
them but an empty parking lot. Turning back toward the guy in the wife-beater
as he backpedaled, Tom said, “Listen man, I’m not sure why she’s trying to mess
with you but there’s no reason for either of us to fuck up our lives. Broken
teeth. Broken hands. I see cop cars parked here all the time.”

Now that the guy was charging
toward him, Tom saw that he wasn’t sixteen, as he’d looked from across the street,
but probably closer to his mid-twenties. His pocked, roughly shaved face and
filthy clothes revealed him to be not the child of privilege given to slumming he’d
appeared from a distance, but something closer to a skinny, drug-addled
convict. “Hey, don’t worry Tinker Bell,” he said, lifting his hands. “It’s just
your life we’re going to fuck up. And
we’ll be long gone with Ashley here by the time any cops come around.”

Tom, halting abruptly in his
retreat, stepped forward, planting his weight on his right foot before swinging
his left leg around in a wide loop and burying the blade of his shin in the boy
convict’s thigh, turning and folding him backward like a three-section chaise
lounge caught in a torrent of wind. As he collapsed, the convict reached out
the arm he’d raised to throw a punch, catching Tom’s collar and pulling him
forward. Tom lunged forward, thrusting up with his right knee, blasting it into
his assailant’s solar plexus and sending them both tumbling to the asphalt.
Taking advantage of the convict’s panic at being struck so hard and knocked
from his upright position, Tom made ready and timed a right elbow to coincide
with their collision against the asphalt. He threw it with a twisting force
gathered from the entire length of his body down to his toes, landing it on the
guy’s temple the instant his shoulders hit the ground, feeling that sort of
crisp resonating bat-on-ball crack of elbow against temple so familiar to him
even though he’d never personally produced it before.

The boy convict went immediately
limp, but his fingers were still wrapped in Tom’s collar. As Tom sat back,
pushing the arm aside, sliding a foot into position to push himself back up to
his feet, he felt the brutal ax blade of a foot wedging itself into the left
side of his torso, lifting him up off his one planted knee. The shock of the blow
made everything flash white. Following some vague instinct, Tom rolled onto his
back and rotated his body on the asphalt to get his feet between him and this
second attacker. This man, whose appearance Tom wouldn’t be able to remember at
all, ended up awkwardly forfeiting the brief opening afforded him by his landed
shot because, having rushed so frantically to the aid of his fallen comrade, he’d
managed to upset his own balance in delivering the kick and was thus forced to
scramble after the man he’d just injured in a clumsy attempt to ensure he’d
sustained enough damage to render him incapable of any further defense.

“I would say I threw a triangle
on him,” Tom said of the final moments of this seconds-long confrontation, “but
it seemed more like he just moved right into it on his own.” As the guy crawled
over Tom’s legs so he could climb atop, pin his torso to the ground and pummel
him, he quickly found his own torso pinched and immobile. Tom had hooked his
right leg over the man’s shoulder, his calf clamped down across the back of the
guy’s neck. Reaching up with his hand, Tom tucked his right foot in the crook
of his left knee, trapping the man’s head and one of his arms in the
constrictive frame of his legs. “I didn’t just choke him out right away like I
would have in training. I was so freaked out that these guys were actually
attacking us that I wanted to make sure I did some damage. So before really
sinking the choke I bloodied up his face pretty good. By then the first guy was
trying to stand up on his chicken legs, and I just wanted to get Ashley the
hell out of there.

“I grabbed her wrist and we
ran—and I swear I heard her laughing. Once we were a few blocks away and the
two skater kids—who were actually more like meth heads as far as I could
tell—as soon as we had some houses and buildings between us, I couldn’t help
it. I just whipped around and started yelling at her. I mean, I was fucking
pissed. At first, she was looking up at me with this dazed look, like she was
drunk, or high, or like she’d just been having a fucking ball. But as I
explained to her that I’d just given that guy a severe concussion, plus
whatever I’d done to his leg—as I’m shouting at her that we were lucky as hell
to get away without me getting mauled half to death and worse happening to her,
she just starts wilting before my eyes.

“Pretty soon she’s in tears and
I’m starting to notice the little stabbing pain in my ribs. When we finally got
to my apartment, she just went straight to her car without saying a word, got
in, and drove away. I didn’t hear from her for two days. On the third day, she
finally responded to a text asking her to call. She said she couldn’t move in
with me, that she didn’t think it could ever work between us. She broke up with
me over the phone. I wanted to plead with her to give me an explanation for why
she’d done it, why she’d provoked those guys. And I wanted her to explain too
what the hell it was she’d wanted that whole time, our whole relationship, that
I wasn’t giving her. What had I done to piss her off so damn much? But the call
was over before I could say any more. That was it. I moved in to this place by
myself.”

***

Tom didn’t have any blood in his
eye. He’d begun taking taekwondo at age thirteen from a pear-shaped, middle-aged
Korean man who barely spoke English. Then at sixteen he’d transferred high
schools and found a place he liked better that was closer to home. Here he
learned from a diminutive blue-collar, country-music American with an amateur
kickboxing record of 40-2 who’d learned karate from a grand master while
stationed with the air force in Japan and Wing Chun from a Chinese man he’d
partnered with in the states so they could open their own school. This was all
in the 90s. When Tom and his friends saw their first Ultimate Fighting Championship
toward the end of the decade, they couldn’t understand why experts in so many
different styles were having such a hard time with the skinny and
boyish-looking Brazilian named Royce Gracie.

Before long, they were doing whatever
they could to teach themselves Brazilian jujitsu, staying after class at their
kickboxing school to practice grappling and submissions, much to their
teacher’s consternation. By a few months later, they’d found a guy closer to
their own age who traveled around to attend seminars in jujitsu and submission
wrestling, and he was looking for guys to train with. They rented a backroom
usually reserved for aerobics classes and split the cost of some wrestling
mats. A couple years later, they found another guy, one who taught Muay Thai,
the style of Thai kickboxing that fighters had the most success with in mixed
martial arts competitions, out of a rundown former office building. It had been
this guy who’d first taught Tom how to throw leg kicks, knees, and elbows like
the ones that would save Ashley and him from their mauling or worse outside
Henry’s all those years later.

Tom discovered he had no blood in
his eye after his first and only full-contact fight in the ring. He took a
beating nearly the entire five minutes of the first round but landed a big head
kick fifteen seconds before the bell—a blow that made his opponent go horrifically
rigid before sending him toppling over like a concrete statue, his arms
remaining freakishly extended in front of him even after he hit the canvas,
bounced, and came to a rest. Tom stood horror-struck. He knew right then he
would never step in a ring or octagon or anything else like that again. When he
told Mark, one of his best friends back in his corner, that he wouldn’t be
pursuing a fight career anymore, Mark responded, “Yeah, we all kind of already
knew you never had any blood in your eye,” and went on to explain that was an old
boxing expression for fighters who had a hard time overcoming their reluctance
to hurt anyone. Tom went on to help a few of his friends prepare for fights,
but over time he attended training sessions with diminishing frequency until he
was done with marital arts altogether and doing more pacific exercise routines
on his own.

Tom’s single venture into the
ring occurred two years after he’d earned his degree in communications at IPFW,
which is the affectionate acronym locals apply to the joint satellite campus
for Indiana and Purdue Universities in Fort Wayne. Throughout college, he’d
delivered pizzas for a place called East of Chicago. After graduating, he moved
on to a local franchise called The Munchie Emporium, which had three locations
in the city and a reputation for employing and serving hippies and stoners. All
the servers and kitchen people Tom worked with were either in a band or had a
boyfriend who was. He would go on to remark of his time there, “It was like a
second education after college. Everyone was sleeping with everyone else. The
whole back of the house was usually taking breaks to pass around a bowl or a
joint. The whole front of the house was taking turns going to the bathrooms to
do lines off the back of the toilet. So all the servers and bartenders are
tweaking and all the cooks are mellowed out. I can’t say I really fit in, but I
was having a fucking great time.”

After it became clear to him that
he was never going to be a professional fighter and that he didn’t want to
serve and bartend for the rest of his life, Tom decided to go back to IPFW and
attend the MBA program that had recently been instituted there. It was as he
was nearing completion of his master’s that he began an internship with the
three-person marketing department at a web design and custom software company
called EntSol (an abbreviation of Enterprise Solutions). Tom finished graduate
school, became a project clarity specialist at EntSol, and started dating
Ashley, who was working at one of the other Munchies stores across town from
the one where he’d worked (though none of them were called Munchies anymore by
then), all within the same two-month period. The PCS position, which had him
serving as a liaison between EntSol’s tech people and the clients, didn’t
really appeal to him. So he decided to take a pay cut and return to the
marketing team, where he’s still working on strategy, testing, and
analytics—all the stuff that drives copywriters like me a little crazy. He said
Ashley was generally supportive, though she let him know she didn’t understand
what he found so distasteful about the PCS gig. “You have to do what makes you
happy, regardless of the money,” she’d told him. “But I think you could have
given it more of a chance.”

***

Tom said he believed the dreams were
leading up to something, or trying to tell him something. What he needed, he
confided to me, was some form of penance—but then he wasn’t even sure if he’d
actually committed any crime. Somehow, notwithstanding his uncertainty, he was
convinced the dreams were pointing the way for him. One particular dream I
wrote up would end up being of particular importance in this regard:

…Tom was on one of the nightly
walks he’d started taking after moving in to his new apartment alone, whenever
he felt like the walls were moving in on him, whenever he feared the heartbreak
would suffocate him, whenever he got too antsy from missing workouts as his
broken ribs healed. In keeping with the bizarre logic of dreams, he approached the
spot on Thieme Drive as if it held no special significance whatsoever, the same
spot he passed almost every night for over a month, the spot where the powdery
golden light of a streetlamp was split by a thin wedge of darkness edged by an
old oak tree standing a few feet away, right between the post and the sidewalk.
As he was passing through the wedge, past the three square steps rising away
from the tree and along a fenced-in walkway up to a house atop a rise, an
aberrant blue light flashed in his periphery, bringing him to a halt. The steps
form the base of a nook enclosed by a low-roofed, maroon-painted garage on the
left, a wooden crosshatched fence on the right, and the always latched gate at
the top. Tom had always grinned passing between the oak and the little nook it
cast into almost perfect darkness, thinking it was the ideal spot for someone
to hide in ambush for lonely night amblers like him.

Now he stood examining a gleaming
cluster of tiny blue flowers rising up out of an orange ceramic pot positioned
square in the middle of the step midway up to the gate, trying to discern the
source of the illumination—though it appeared as though it was the flowers themselves
giving off the glow—and wondering why anyone would leave them in the middle of
this staircase. After a few moments, he could no longer resist stepping forward
to examine the flowers. He lifted the pot and turned with it to bring it closer
to the oak tree. Sure enough, it continued to give off the blue glow, mesmerizing
him into tightly focused oblivion, until he heard a voice, vaguely familiar,
demanding to know what he was doing.

Still transfixed by the flowers,
he began to say he was simply appreciating the wondrous phenomenon of the blue
glow—like open-air bioluminescence—when he heard the sourceless voice muttering
something that sounded like a name, as if the woman—yes, it was a woman’s voice
for sure—were addressing someone else, and her tone carried an unmistakable
note of impatience. Tom finally broke the trance and turned one way, then the
other, scanning for the woman whose voice he’d heard. Most of the house was
hidden from view by the fence and a hedge running along the inside of it, but
he could see that the front door, lit dimly yellow by a porch light, was sealed
and inert. Hearing the muttered, indecipherable name again, he turned looking first
toward the far end of the garage, and then farther up the sidewalk and the
street that it ran alongside. Before his feet caught up with his side-turned eyes,
a shout like an explosion of rage sent him stumbling backward. Fumbling with
the flowerpot, he tripped on a sidewalk section pushed up by one of the
darkening oak’s roots and began to fall.

But he didn’t land on the
sidewalk. He landed in mud, which was redolent of putrescence. Now with a firm
hold of the pot, he started to sit up, and he knew immediately where he
was—down by the river across the street from the sidewalk, and down the steep,
tree-strewn bank, two blocks up from the oak-shaded nook, at the base of the
concrete overlook adjacent to the Main Street Bridge over the Saint Mary's. He knew
immediately too that the bioluminescent flowers were no longer in the pot he
was holding clasped to his stomach. Desperation overtook him. He had to find
those flowers and return them to the pot. Setting the pot aside, he got to his
feet, darting glances frantically in all directions. The blue light, he
thought. Just look for the blue light. How can you possibly miss it?

As soon as he stood still for a
moment, he noticed a faint glow emanating from around the curved base of the
overlook. For some reason, his desperation now turned to apprehension, but he
stepped forward to investigate, hoping to find the lost luminescent flowers.
Rounding the base of the monument, he had no trouble seeing where they now
grew. Tom saw first the light, then the myriad sprouting star-burst petals, and finally the half buried, half rotted human body
whose head they were clustered about. The terror didn’t seize him instantly,
but rather crept upon him as he approached. As he drew nearer to the body, he could
discern the angles of the crowded, tangled stems, right down to where their
roots had discovered a new source for their sustenance.

The left side of the man’s face
had decayed down to the skull, but much of the flesh had been replaced by
grayish mud that resembled the decomposing skin on the other side. Tom leaned
down to see if it would be possible to extricate the roots without disrupting
the body—without touching it—but saw
that the left eye, partially caked over with mud, partially glaring back at him
with that familiar black, empty-socket skull’s glare, had somehow allowed the central
stem of a large cluster of glowing blue flowers to grow up from its hollowed
depths. Tom had brought himself back to his full height and taken two steps
back from the corpse before consciously registering the repugnance and terror
which were propelling him away. His awareness of his own intensifying panic
grew simultaneously with the dawning realization that he was dreaming. As he
hauled himself up from the muddy riverbank and into consciousness, the
brightening glow of the flowers merged with the light of the morning sun
seeping in through the breaking seal of his lids.